Caroline Allain > Caroline's Quotes

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf

“Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“When do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?" I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. "I don't know," I said. "Tomorrow.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“At first I saw you everywhere.
Now only in certain things,
at longer intervals.”
― Louise Glück

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot

“You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Here it is:
the new way of living with the world

inside of us so we cannot lose it,
and we cannot be lost.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.

It has been a beautiful
fight.

Still
is.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“there’s nothing to
discuss
there’s nothing to
remember
there’s nothing to
forget

it’s sad
and
it’s not
sad

seems the
most sensible
thing
a person can
do
is
sit
with drink in
hand
as the walls
wave
their goodbye
smiles

one comes through
it
all
with a certain
amount of
efficiency and
bravery
then
leaves

some accept
the possibility of
God
to help them
get
through

others
take it
staight on

and to these

I drink
tonight.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“The world is neither fair nor right, but it has a way of balancing itself.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows

“For the ones who fight their way forward”
― V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“When something bothered me, I didn’t talk with anyone about it. I thought it over all by myself, came to a conclusion, and took action alone. Not that I really felt lonely. I thought that’s just the way things are. Human beings, in the final analysis, have to survive on their own.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“I have a thin skin.

I think this is part and parcel of depression and anxiety - to be precise - being a person quite likely to get depression and anxiety … I don’t fight it. I accept things more. This is who I am. And besides, fighting it actually makes it worse. The trick is to befriend depression and anxiety. To be thankful for them, because you can deal with them a lot better. And the way I have befriended them is by thanking them for my thin skin.

Sure, without a thin skin I would have never known those terrible days of nothingness. Those days of either panic, or intense, bone-scorching lethargy. The days of self-hate, or drowning under invisible waves. I sometimes felt, in my self-pity, too fragile for a world of speed and right angles and noise. (I love Jonathan Rottenberg’s evolutionary theory of depression, that is to do with the being unable to adapt to the pendent: 'An ancient mood system has collided with a highly novel operating environment created by a remarkable species.’)

But would I go along to a magical mind spa and ask for a skin-thickening treatment? Probably not. You need to feel life’s terror to feel its wonder.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
― Anne Sexton

“You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.”
― Clive Barker

“Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“The world is a mess and I want to laugh because all I can think is how horrible and beautiful it is.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me

“Do you wanna leave soon?
No, I want enough time to be in love with everything...
And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.”
― Marina Keegan

“...may I never lose that terror that keeps me brave”
― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems

“Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction

“What fire does not destroy, it hardens”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Foretelling

“You are -- your life, and nothing else.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit